Supporting Additive Manufacturing: Plastometrex CTO Secures £1m Future Leaders Fellowship

As CTO, Dr. Campbell’s primary responsibilities up until now have centred around the development of the company’s first commercial product – the Indentation Plastometer. This benchtop device measures the strength characteristics of metallic materials from a simple indentation test in under 5 minutes. The technology reduces the cost of mechanical testing by up to 90%, testing turnaround times by over 95%, and material wastage by up to 99%. Machines are currently in use across 5 continents, having been adopted by some of the world’s most prominent industrial companies, and highest-ranked universities, supporting a wide range of activities spanning advanced R&D, failure analyses, and small component testing.

Dr. Campbell’s Future Leaders Fellowship is focussed on supporting development within the metal additive manufacturing (AM) community, where the testing and qualification of 3D printed parts have been cited as two of the biggest barriers to the uptake and adoption of metal AM. The large costs associated with printing and (mechanically) testing coupons are also a major problem for the qualification of AM parts and processes. With Indentation Plastometry (also known as PIP), the method used within Plastometrex’s testing devices, the strength characteristics of metal AM components can be measured both quickly and non-destructively. Another important attribute of PIP testing is that it can be used to map spatially varying properties across components, with inhomogeneity being a common feature of metal printed parts. For these reasons, machines have already been sold to recognisable industry OEMs.

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